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Mendelian randomization (MR) has become a popular approach to study the effect of a modifiable exposure on an outcome by using genetic variants as instrumental variables. A challenge in MR is that each genetic variant explains a relatively…

Importance sampling (IS) is a common reweighting strategy for off-policy prediction in reinforcement learning. While it is consistent and unbiased, it can result in high variance updates to the weights for the value function. In this work,…

Subsampling techniques can reduce the computational costs of processing big data. Practical subsampling plans typically involve initial uniform sampling and refined sampling. With a subsample, big data inferences are generally built on the…

We propose a new likelihood-based approach for estimation, inference and variable selection for parametric cure regression models in time-to-event analysis under random right-censoring. In this context, it often happens that some subjects…

The partitioning of data for estimation and calibration critically impacts the performance of propensity score based estimators like inverse probability weighting (IPW) and double/debiased machine learning (DML) frameworks. We extend recent…

The doubly robust (DR) estimator, which consists of two nuisance parameters, the conditional mean outcome and the logging policy (the probability of choosing an action), is crucial in causal inference. This paper proposes a DR estimator for…

AI models are often evaluated based on their ability to predict the outcome of interest. However, in many AI for social impact applications, the presence of an intervention that affects the outcome can bias the evaluation. Randomized…

Dynamic Treatment Regimes (DTRs) provide a systematic framework for optimizing sequential decision-making in chronic disease management, where therapies must adapt to patients' evolving clinical profiles. Inverse probability weighting (IPW)…

Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) and invariant risk minimization (IRM) are two popular methods proposed to improve out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization performance of machine learning models. While effective for small models,…

In extreme value theory and other related risk analysis fields, probability weighted moments (PWM) have been frequently used to estimate the parameters of classical extreme value distributions. This method-of-moment technique can be applied…

We introduce a distributionally robust approach that enhances the reliability of offline policy evaluation in contextual bandits under general covariate shifts. Our method aims to deliver robust policy evaluation results in the presence of…

Inverse probability weighting (IPW) is a general tool in survey sampling and causal inference, used both in Horvitz-Thompson estimators, which normalize by the sample size, and H\'ajek/self-normalized estimators, which normalize by the sum…

Importance sampling is a central idea underlying off-policy prediction in reinforcement learning. It provides a strategy for re-weighting samples from a distribution to obtain unbiased estimates under another distribution. However,…

Learning effective contextual-bandit policies from past actions of a deployed system is highly desirable in many settings (e.g. voice assistants, recommendation, search), since it enables the reuse of large amounts of log data.…

We consider the problem of regression with selectively observed covariates in a nonparametric framework. Our approach relies on instrumental variables that explain variation in the latent covariates but have no direct effect on selection.…

We present a novel theoretical framework, Q-MMR, for off-policy evaluation in finite-horizon MDPs. Q-MMR learns a set of scalar weights, one for each data point, such that the reweighted rewards approximate the expected return under the…

In this paper, we aim to develop a simple and scalable reinforcement learning algorithm that uses standard supervised learning methods as subroutines. Our goal is an algorithm that utilizes only simple and convergent maximum likelihood loss…

There is growing interest in developing causal inference methods for multi-valued treatments with a focus on pairwise average treatment effects. Here we focus on a clinically important, yet less-studied estimand: causal drug-drug…

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in both contextual bandits and reinforcement learning allows one to evaluate novel decision policies without needing to conduct exploration, which is often costly or otherwise infeasible. The problem's importance…

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is critical for applying contextual bandit algorithms to high-stakes decision-making settings such as healthcare, where new treatment policies must be evaluated prior to deployment. Unfortunately, OPE techniques…